The Hidden Back Room

by Jason A. Wyckoff

  As the guilty often do, he talked too much and drifted off-topic at every opportunity. At one point, he related experiences from his time employed as a prison guard. How he got on that subject, I cannot recall.

  ‘Newbies were the ones to watch out for. They were the most likely to do it. Usually hanging; almost always, really. In the summer a month couldn’t go by without someone hanging themselves.’

  He laughed and kicked at the glistening blacktop like it was a dusty infield.

  ‘But every now and again, somebody would go another route. A couple times an inmate got into the cleaning supplies and drank as much drain cleaner as he could manage, sure that that would kill him. Thing is, though: It didn’t, not always. I don’t know if you can picture it, but I can tell you they damn well wished they’d succeeded! Put everyone else off of it for a while, that’s for sure. Damned half a neck and all!’ He shook his head, smiling. ‘Can’t eat, can’t talk, ugly as sin!’

  A horrid visual did come to mind, but not the one he described. For some reason, I was reminded of an entirely different circumstance, when I was on the gulf coast after hurricane Katrina. I hadn’t been doing field-work for long; I continued after only by telling myself I would never see worse (I was well inured to the job by my trip to Galveston). New Orleans grabbed the headlines—unfortunately, deservedly so—but the devastation was spread far and wide along the coast. Factory farms were especially hard hit. Livestock were penned in when the storm made landfall. I know a bird is not a man, but the numbers were staggering. Poultry deaths were measured in the millions. Feathered lumps littered the ground and stopped up waterways. Warehouses were declared totalled and bulldozed without even a cursory investigation of the contents.

  I saw one mass grave, and there learned to avoid all others. The roil of the maggots was to be expected. I did not anticipate the desperate squirming of the survivors who’d been pushed in with the rest.

  As I listened to the story of the prison, and unexpectedly thought instead of the ‘chicken-pit’ (has ever so apt a term so blunted its horror?), I experienced a sort of ‘tri-fold’ sensation. The elevating warmth was present, but conglomerated with layered understanding. The memory of the pit was traumatising, but it was important for another reason, one I could not acknowledge until after I’d been removed from the situation. I’d had a feeling then, too, but not exactly the same as the one I’d recently come to know. The feeling then had been one of closing the loop—it was not a feeling of déjà vu,exactly—though I at first misidentified it as such—but more a feeling of recognising a hidden memory—one that occurred in a dream: I had seen the pit before, but the memory had been lost to morning, recalled only by the insistence of its reality. I was sure I had dreamt the scene, though I could not recall the event of dreaming it.

  And so the first intimation of meaning accompanied my ‘sensation’: the idea of continuity—that these sensations were related, even if only through my experience. Intriguingly, it also appeared that my mind was not always constrained by the usual singular, forward flow of time. The aged dyad of dream and realisation (and accompanying proto-‘sensation’) came to me outside of that sodden building to reveal a clue of context: that I was not merely a receiver of strange radio waves, I was the listener—perhaps able to scan for the music I wanted to hear.

  Unfortunately, all attempts at ‘practice’ failed. I could not activate the sensation, either by means of meditation or recreational drug use or physical exertion. Control eluded me. I took to my Zen studies, though, and worked to master the art of shutting off my conscious mind—even if I achieved my results more by forcibly silencing my thoughts than ‘letting them go’.

  Some months later, the sensation returned, but again varied in aspect. This time the feeling was intermittent and lasted all day, a bloom in spasm that never quite opened. It came upon me whenever I noticed anything orange—and I could hardly miss anything of that colour: Orange objects popped from the background, almost as though there was a ‘super’ third dimension of space, in which only things of importance could exist. These things flared until saturated with glow, yet remained sharply defined at every edge. Pure orange is uncommon; you might see it as an offset colour in advertising, but it appears most often to signal ‘safety’—or ‘warning’. Traffic cones, safety vests, a crane —they all ‘screamed’ at me. I remember being most fascinated when passing an open loading dock, across which stretched a square-grid plastic net like a blazing web.

  That evening, in my apartment (I was ‘home’ for once), I once again tried to make sense of what I’d experienced. I reflected on the colour orange, especially as it related to its common usage and meaning. I weighed the visual component of this occurrence, different from the auditory cues that heretofore ‘activated’ the sensation, and I reflected on the expanded duration and fluctuation. As always, understanding was not forthcoming. I concentrated on the idea of visual. I closed my eyes, and thought of orange—necessitating the thought of an orange for expediency’s sake. The concept seemed sound, as far as practicable visualisation went, for I could not conceive of an object simpler and more defined than a single orange. I strived to ‘see’ it but could not. One can ‘visualise’ easily, but this is really the folly of conceiving of a thing and believing the concept is the appearance; I believe the ancient Greeks may have argued this point. To actually see the thing proved impossible. I suppose I should take comfort that I lacked the ability to make myself hallucinate.

  To compound my frustration, I had a song stuck in my head—not even the whole of the song, but only the opening measures, before the vocals commence. It was that most terribly catchy and mentally debilitating riff ever to strangle the airwaves, the basic guitar figure of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. I could only quiet my thoughts for a few seconds before it returned unbidden. Undoubtedly I had heard it in the background that day or the one before (it would be hardly surprising, as classic rock plays over the speakers at half of the places I eat (and the song might even be in rotation on a few of the country stations that made up the other half). I’m sure I had ignored it, but the song had stuck, anyway. And now I found my vaunted mental discipline apparently inadequate to brush aside a few seconds of unwanted music. The tack of listening to the song to relieve myself of its peripheral insistence was certainly available to me at a few keystrokes—in fact, playback was entirely unnecessary; having heard the song a thousand times, I could sing every line and recreate every part from memory—but I refused to be cowed by something so unbearably common. Overmatched, such refusal hardly constituted victory. Instead, my efforts served only to reinforce that annoyance—that I could no more easily get the thought of the thing (a song) out of my head than I could force understanding of another (my sensation).

  When next the feeling came over me (early September again, a year after Galveston), it knocked me to the ground; I believe I lost consciousness for a split second. I blamed hunger and fatigue and refused having emergency services called to assist me, promising to eat as soon as I left the scene. The person who acceded to my wish was disinclined towards sympathising, anyway, as I was there to deny part of his claim in the face of unspeakable tragedy, and he likely would have been unmoved if I had dropped dead instead of fainted. The internal flare was so abrupt as to be violent, the sense of ‘message’ overwhelming and undeniable. My feeling of elevation was more of a sucking upwards, like the vacuum created by a door flung open directly above me. My eyes burned with whirling snow as my body fell limp.

  The comment which prompted (or accompanied) my ‘seizure’ was simultaneously blasé and brutally apt. I was explaining to a man named Morgan why the company would not pay the property loss on the SUV that exploded when it was struck by lightning, killing his brother (and family).

  ‘It’s much the same as if he’d replaced the wiring in his home, and then it burned down because of an electrical fire,’ I said. ‘That claim would be paid, as his liability coverage provided for his fault. So, too, if he had
driven into a storm, and then the car had been struck by lightning, his ill-advised decision would have put him at fault and therefore liable, and covered. But, because the car was struck on a clear day where no party could have anticipated the damaging act, no party can be said to be at fault—it was an “act of God”.’

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ Morgan growled, ‘if it had been his own damn fault that he got hisself and his wife and kids killed—and, apparently, you’re saying that that’s possible when you get struck by lightning on an overpass—then you’d pay up.’

  ‘The company would cover the loss, yes.’

  ‘But because he did nothing at all anybody else wouldn’t have done, The Company won’t pay nothin’.’

  ‘No, not because it had anything to do with what he did at all. Rather, that the damage was caused by nature in such a way that it could not have been prevented or avoided—such as might have been the case with a storm he drove directly into.’

  ‘Wow,’ Morgan drawled, ‘I guess the Devil is in the details, huh?’

  And I swooned.

  After I’d recovered (and did, in fact, eat a full meal), I lay upside-down on the hotel bed and quickly concluded—blessed by that unsupportable instinct of certainty—that the sensation itself was not ‘the event’, and therefore not a thing to pursue directly; rather, the oblique specifics that the sensation highlighted should command my focus. Perhaps, then, whatever ‘meaning’ (or convergence) they guided me towards, if correctly divined, might initiate the sensation—sort of like the old game of ‘getting warmer’.

  Ah. Well, then—if I did follow the clues correctly, what might I expect to find?

  The Devil?

  The idea smacked of literalism I found unlikely (and frankly, unpalatable), yet the sensation upon hearing that phrase—‘the devil is in the details’—hit me like none other had. And not only was the idea of what to examine related—the details, those verbal and visual data that the sensation accompanied—but the end goal was also clearly identified.

  Of course, even if I succeeded, I had no expectation of meeting the Old Scratch incarnate, burning pitchfork in hand.

  But—?

  I was pioneering my own soft science. How should I know exactly what to expect? Clearly, I shouldn’t prejudice myself against any possibility. And though I had no desire to immerse myself in diabolism of any sort, two responsibilities obliged me to pursue the matter: that any possibility beyond self-deception existed at all and, perhaps more importantly, because there was an obvious answer to the question, ‘Why me?’ After all, disaster was my specialty. The likelihood that I’d been ‘chosen’ to receive this opportunity because of my profession, or that my occupational proximity to such events ‘opened’ me to this special perception, seemed to dispel all other possibilities save random chance, and every aspect of my experience indicated asorting out of probabilities rather than their heedless indulgence.

  I emptied my head and watched the ceiling fan; a lolling procession trailed the slow spin, a second circle tracing the same circumference. My eyelids shuttered and the blades froze for a split-second, a split-second, a split-second. When my breath was slow and shallow and regular, I let my thoughts drift in again.

  The perfect circle of her lips. The kiss of an oracle: prediction, then realisation. Déjà vu as seen from the front, a dream of a nightmare yet to come. Something will happen. Orange: warning, danger. Sunset? I’d forgotten I was looking out the window that evening. Did the horizon burn with saturation as that damn song held sway in my head? I cursed myself for thinking of it. I groaned as the guitar introduction began again. I prepared to fight it again, but thought better. Why should I prejudice myself against clues I found unsavoury? I let it ‘play’: sweet home Alabama. Was that to be my destination? I had no business there. I laughed, thinking I was tormented by the wrong tune. After all, if a ubiquitous southern rock song was to be my guide, then Charlie Daniels would have us believe ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia’. Immediately Daniels’s frenetic fiddle overwhelmed the Skynyrd guitar lodged in my thoughts. But both clues were somehow still wrong, the lack of accompaniment serving to spotlight the incompleteness of the arrangement. I anticipated seeing neither state in the near future—and I flatly refused to believe that this easy association was the string of clues I was meant to follow, despite my conviction to preclude no possibility. Revelation so trite seemed valueless. Besides, ‘I couldn’t live in a place that never cooled off’—that was one of the clues, wasn’t it? (An odd one in reference to the Devil, I thought, especially as the threat of a Southern Rock hell seemed all too real—there could be no joy in a place where hearing Molly Hatchet might be imagined a reprieve). Besides, those ‘Bible Belt’ states were still six weeks off from closing their windows at night. So, if my ‘revelation’ was true, then it seemed I was due for another lengthy interval of waiting until my path led me in that direction. The next week I was due in Ohio. I was to fly in to Columbus on Thursday and then head southeast to settle minor claims in Athens and Marietta.

  A shudder ran through my body as I remembered that all three cities shared names with counterparts in Georgia. I was suddenly aware of how close the ceiling fan appeared. I dropped four feet and bounced on the mattress.

  I spent two days explaining to clients that they would have to file suit against the energy company to which they’d sold their drilling rights in order to get recompense for their newly-flammable well-water. I helpfully provided the names and numbers of several attorneys practicing such litigation, several of whom I knew to process quick, small settlements—undoubtedly in collusion with the companies being sued. The only time I delivered ‘good news’ was to a client whose house had burned to the ground when she’d tried to extinguish a kitchen fire with the accelerant. I had to tell her that, unfortunately, while my company was prepared to pay the claim for her loss, her property value, divested of its drilling rights, had declined in value as a result of the environmental contamination.

  With my business concluded I found myself in one of those chain establishments that enamoured Roger. I felt a mix of disappointment that my ‘destiny’ appeared to recede to the horizon, and relief that I had avoided the ignominy of being delivered to it, even obliquely, by a niche musical genre. My dinner finished, I would soon drive on to Pittsburgh and wait for a red-eye back to home base. And then I was abruptly roused from my contentment by a familiar voice.

  ‘Well, I’ll be damned.’

  Bottle in hand, Roger slid into the booth across from me.

  I’m sure I expressed pleasant surprise, happy disbelief—the expected. Only after we’d exchanged the mundane particulars that brought us there did I begin to squirm. The coincidence, regardless of the quite sensible reasons that allowed for it, was too oppressive—at least for someone who wasexpecting something out of the usual. Roger reacted normally; he was effusive, flushed red with alcohol and unexpected delight. In the interval required for the both of us to accept the unlikely reunion, I fought the urge to get up and run—and to drag Roger out with me as I went. But I had begun to smoulder inside; my lungs felt like balloons. I was here for this. For something. Something soon.

  Surprisingly, it was Roger who introduced the subject that weighed on my mind.

  He sighed and nodded towards the door. ‘There’s one in every room: someone to steal my heart.’

  I looked and saw he was indicating the hostess, a young woman pretty enough for the setting. I didn’t remember her from when I came in; either she came on later or I was too preoccupied to notice.

  ‘Red hair and green eyes. You know, folklore has it that that’s what the devil looks like when he takes the form of a woman.’

  I froze. I struggled to reopen my throat and choke down a mouthful of beer.

  ‘Do you think that’s what the devil looks like?’ I sputtered.

  He looked at me bemusedly. ‘The job kicking at your conscience?’ he chuckled. ‘I got asked twice today if I’d sold my soul. I guess it’s likely
as not that the devil looks like me.’

  I pushed my bottle aside; there was no way I could finish it. I laughed unconvincingly.

  ‘I figure the thing to do is to make a wager,’ I said. ‘The devil likes wagers as much as deals, right? So you go up to someone and you say, “I’ll wager you my soul that you are the devil”.’

  Roger nodded. ‘Nice. If you’re right, you win, if you’re wrong, you don’t lose.’

  ‘Well, that’s not fair,’ a woman’s voice said, ‘How like a man.’ The fire-top hostess stood beside our table, smirking. ‘Can I get you guys anything?’ She winked. ‘I should mention we only take cash or plastic.’

  ‘No, thank you,’ I said. Roger nearly wilted as he shook his head. I had known him long enough not to be shocked at his odd shyness.

  After she left, Roger coughed, as though there had been some obstruction preventing his speaking.

  He said, ‘I think that that’s our illusion—man’s illusion: the magic of the signed document—the idea that paper can be imbued with ironclad trickery. You know how we yield our policies like weapons. We’re amateurs! I don’t think the devil relies as much on wordplay as legend would have us believe.’ He laughed. ‘After all, doesn’t it say in the Bible somewhere that thinking of an act is as bad as committing it? I think that if you invoke the devil with intent, then you’ve already made your deal.’